Nobel laureate economist Paul Krugman on ending the Great Recession

May 18, 2012

Hour 1

The United States economy isn’t recovering from The Great Recession quickly enough for Nobel laureate economist PAUL KRUGMAN. The U.S. unemployment rate is hovering just over 8 percent, when in 2007, the beginning of the financial crisis, according to Krugman, it didn’t spike above 5 percent. The New York Times columnist, blogger and Princeton professor of economics believes we need a governmental jump-start to offset the country’s high inflation and growing deficit. He walks us through the financial crisis that triggered the steepest economic downturn since the Great Depression, and the flaws he sees in the decisions made by President Obama, former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, current Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, among others. Krugman has recently been responding to the $3 billion-and-growing loss by the nation’s largest bank, JP Morgan Chase, calling for restoring the federal safeguards that, he says, kept the 20th century relatively financially stable. He’s also been looking at what the past few years of austerity measures and a depressed economy in Greece mean for the rest of us. Paul Krugman’s new book is “End this Depression Now!”

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